


A pie full of pandemic

by Vnutrenni



Category: Doomsday (2008)
Genre: Cannibalism, F/F, Femslash, Non-Graphic Sex, Non-Graphic Violence, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-21
Updated: 2009-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-04 21:41:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,854
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/34407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vnutrenni/pseuds/Vnutrenni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eat a slice of snakebite, spit out all the scales.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A pie full of pandemic

**Author's Note:**

  * For [seriousfic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/seriousfic/gifts).



There are bombs dropping on the other side of the Wall. She knows it by the sound, rising and expanding like thunder over the Thames, like solemn voices that call out to her: _your cure, it didn't work_.

"Not mine," Eden calls back. She can't hear herself, and it's not just the ambiance of the workshop or the arc welder sputtering in her hand anymore. Three explosions press like soft wax against her eardrums, or else her ears are stuffed with pulled cotton and feedback. "Who said it was mine, asshole? What cure?"

The Chop Shop is suddenly a madhouse. Critters scramble all over the place, grabbing power tools before they tumble together for cover like a pack falling kits over kutten into a foxhole. Priorities, she thinks wearily. She's got to teach them about bloody priorities too. Right after table manners, then. She gets up and takes out a cigarette she rolled earlier in the week, lights it with the welder and walks to the door to get a look at the one visible mushroom cloud blooming up into the sky.

As she watches – and later, she thinks, _Jesus I really shouldn't have stared at that shit for so long_ – the spectacular science of thermonuclear physics turns uranium into a tacky imitation of sunrise, yellow like light from the old halogen lamps in her firetrap of a flat back in London. Although it's not really hers anymore. And it's certainly not in London anymore because by now London is sky-high with a flight of angels. It takes her a while to decide how she feels about that. Educated to the standard of state orphanages, she remembers learning about the Second World War, the German Blitz over English cities, and she thinks it's a shame that any country should pull through something so awful as that just to pop a nuke on itself only a century later. Some real winners in charge of national security. She feels an increasingly aggressive sense of suspicion whenever she thinks about the Reaper virus and the people who sent her out knocking on coffins to ask for a cup of sugar; they strike her as being the very same sort of people who might look at the sleek cobalt shell of a bomb and see a morning-after pill.

There is a shockwave that rattles the patchwork metal walls and resonates in the heavily-rusted frames of three mostly unsalvageable automobiles. There will eventually be fallout. She'll have to deal with that somehow, keep everyone clean. Idly she considers taking them to the storage bunker sunk under the foothills, but she's never known any punks with a particularly high aptitude for spelunking. Which was unfortunate, really. Spelunking punks. The underground goes hardcore subterranean, right? Bill would have laughed at that. Disparagingly, but still. She leans on the ragged edge of the doorframe and tilts her head back. Dark clouds are smoothing away the layers between smog and atmosphere, their bellies skittering with radioactive residues, bright as gold. It's nearly poetic: the long-lost art of alchemy rediscovered at the dawn of a new day.

Her cigarette tastes pretty fucking stale.

She flicks it down into the gravel with a sigh.

She goes back inside.

 

* * *

 

  
Two hours later, dead people are crawling into the Chop Shop from the wastelands.

As in, the charming wastelands of Scotland; Eden really has no clue what's up outside the Wall, and fuck what's outside, there are dead people crawling around in the Chop Shop.

As in, full-dead and a few she definitely killed herself. She's making a conscious effort to be relaxed about the whole thing, but it's tough to take it easy and try-a-piece-of-your-friend when, looking back, she is sure that she really was not friendly with _these_ people specifically. She stares at a guy and realizes that the half-healed mass of his face was probably punched into hamburger meat by a shotgun kind of like the one she'd been carrying when she still had her gear. Awkward.

A handful of the live ones are lurking around her like wolves, all stiff legs and lip studs flashing like fangs. She can tell they're uncertain. One after another, they come dark-stepping on the edges of her perception and then fade out again, obviously trying to decide if they should push her forward or pull her back. Dumb as posts, most of these kids, so she isn't really worried that they'll make up their minds any time soon. It does occur to her though that, even if by some miracle they side with her cleanly, they won't react to orders with the kind of snap time she's come to expect from military service. So she might as well assume that she's standing alone.

She looks at the blackened skin and the blisters healing over. Third-degree burns on plague boils. Doesn't make sense; the blasts weren't close enough to do so much as tan her arm. She figured they'd all get radiation sickness and possibly die, but later. She breathes a bit, just to make sure that she still can.

The one with the face walks in from the sun last and then turns around to pull the sheet metal door shut behind him. Darkness. Eden blinks light-stains out of her eyes, reminds herself that they must have it worse, and that's assuming their eyeballs haven't melted out of their sockets. She doesn't get off of her workbench. It's her fucking workbench, for one thing; and for another it gives her a useful pivoting point. A few feet away, she has the arc welder lying behind a stack of hubcaps, probably hidden from view, probably within reach if she can move as fast as she hopes she can. Faceless is coming toward her, brushing past the other half a dozen who came in ahead of him; her body drops just a bit, her weight rolling back to spring forward – and he holds up his hands instantly, palms open. She waits, but doesn't relax. He steps over the front axle she'd been cutting, hands still up. Slowly, he lowers one of them.

“I'm Wade,” says a flap of skin above his chin. “I think I remember you shooting me in the head.”

So awkward.

“Yeah.” Keeping an eye on the welder, she takes his hand. Delicately. There's not a whole lot of hand to take. “Yeah, you know, I think I remember shooting you. Call me Eden.”

“Uh huh. What else would your name be, right?”

“Right,” she says coldly.

“No, really,” Wade says. He leaves a smear of something better left unstudied on her fingers. “Because this is funny now. I've got a message. For you, I guess.” Blue as berries, his tongue peeks out, swiftly, unpleasantly, and Eden knows what he's going to say a second before he adds: “From the snake.”

 

* * *

 

Things are coming back to her in long, weightless rush. It’s strange. It’s like hearing radio messages on a dead channel; a steady drone of static and suddenly there are voices wheeling in her ear, kaleidoscopes smashing across gray matter, an old address, a face and radiance grinding her whole life into glittering powder.

_“You’ve got to lighten up, Eden. Sunshine smiles, let’s see one.”_

 

* * *

 

The way Viper might tell the story, it went like this:

First thing, she shuffled her memory and came up with a few blank cards. Like where she was, and who she was, and why a Polaroid would ignite on seeing its subject. She flipped them over, the blanks; and over and over, and they turned into the king of clubs, the queen of spades, yellow card, red card, you're off the pitch. Long time ago, an old man called Papa shouting at a flatscreen on the wall. Poisonous man. She gets it from him, perhaps. Meanwhile, panic was approaching her in a sideways shuffle, sitting down next to her in the grass, waiting patiently for her to get her head on straight.

There's a lot of blood, panic started telling her helpfully. There's an awful lot of blood.

And she answered: “Hiss.”

And the warm, liquid sky gazing down on her had suddenly smiled with sunlight, because that - after all - had been exactly the right thing to say.

 

* * *

 

All sorts of children roam the world, unloved and unlooked-for. Wolves and raccoons and chittering squirrels and those blackbirds with the particularly grating cry. Someone’s offspring. And human babies, too; and monsters with human heads, and humans with a serpent’s face scrawled on like a battle mask.

But then, that’s the whole point, isn’t it?

Viper sits up and pulls long shards of lead-based paint out of her hair, her arms, one from beneath her eyelid. She wonders just what the hell her head got up to while she wasn’t looking. There isn’t any pain; or if there is, she doesn’t feel it. Too bad, she thinks. Pain has always been there for her before. Whenever she needed it. A touchstone, a rallying point. Broken fingers help you get your hackles up. Punching back isn’t a good idea, so kill streetpunks with your teeth instead.

A few of the boys are coming toward her, she can see them easily across the flats. Broken-hip gait, but at a good pace. Her throat is dry. She can’t think of anything she should call out to them anyway. They walk up the dry ridge, crunching grass under their heavy boots, and they lie down beside her, put their heads in her lap. It’s beautiful, a seafoam rainbow of greasy, ragged hair spilling over her hands, multicoloured cats to stroke.

“Heads stay down,” she whispers, voice like steel shavings. “Sleep now.”

They rest a bit while others come, more slowly; and the wind sifts brown ash onto her shoulders, slower still.

 

* * *

 

And, from very far away, she thinks Sol might be shouting:

“Smile, crocodile! Don't tell me you forgot how it's done.”

Maybe she’s fallen asleep, too.

She smiles. Crocodile-style.

Time to find monsters and eat them all up.

 

* * *

 

Eden agrees to go because the whole situation is too fucking weird to ignore.

That’s the truth of it, really. She’d decided to stay in Scotland out of fascination, so there was no reason for her shy away from this little jack-in-the-box. If it was dangerous, it was worth her attention. If they wanted to kill her, they could just go ahead and give it a shot. Wouldn’t be first time she got them before they could get her.

No one makes any aggressive moves on her as they get into the Lincoln, though, and that’s actually more unnerving that anything else. A couple of the walking wounded are pretty horribly disfigured, but they don’t seem to notice. In fact, they seem to be scabbing up in a hell of a hurry and she starts to wonder if whatever’s got them back on their feet is healing them, too. She tries to think of a way around that while they drive; she needs a good way to incapacitate the walking dead. Head and heart are always weak points, as she recalls. She tries to remember which level of her virtual training taught her that, then realizes it was definitely just one of her honest-to-god mainstream video games, not official prep.

They drive for an hour. Away from the ruins of cities, through the ruins of towns. They start talking, tentatively, then about cars with some enthusiasm, then about Lewis Carroll. Apparently they treasure an old copy of Alice In Wonderland, which is almost too much for Eden to handle. Fortunately, Wade slaps the dashboard before she has to remember what the hell a March Hare is and says, “Somewhere around here.”

Right around the place where the husks of overturned buses and various deathmobiles still lie ruined on the roadside. She’d figured they would be coming back here, but it still gets a sigh out of her.

That’s when she sees her. Through the strange light and a veil of dust; an unmistakeable woman, written over with elaborate inks, wrapped up in scraps and clothing that obviously belongs to other people, surrounded by a crowd, bloodied but sedate. Eden pulls over and gets out of the car slowly. She leans on the door and stares. So much for beheading as an effective way to keep them down.

Everyone is gathered in an informal circle around the woman. She doesn’t seem to be talking, but they all seem to be listening. Curiosity finally get the best of Eden again; she slams the car door loudly, like a gunshot. All eyes are on her while she walks up, so she takes her time.

“Ah, her,” the woman says. Her voice is a bit rough. Warm, though; welcoming. She’s actually smiling. “I know her. If I am Viper, she is Eden.”

Eden rolls uneasily in her skin. “You don’t know my name.”

“Ah.” Viper nods. Foxfur over her breasts, deerskin on her arms, strips of cloth trailing colourfully at her heels like vestigial wings and torn leather beneath. She looks like a fairy queen or some self-styled brahma’s pet enlightenment addict; she looks like Mab, dragged through the dirt and given human form. Her tattoos are caked with golden dust. Eden realizes that the crowd around her has parted because she is walking through it. “I didn’t. But now I know everything.”

When Viper holds out her hand, it seems to glow for a moment. White with calluses. Phosphorus pale.

“I’m not an idiot,” Eden says.

“That’s why you’re going to come here,” Viper replies. “And let me touch you.”

It’s an odd impulse, but Eden wants to obey. So instead she grabs Viper’s wrist; and when Viper smiles, she gathers that being touched is the same as touching to some people. And she wants to be furiously angry about something, anything. She wants to be able to concentrate on anger.

Out on the flats, darkness is pooling in the deep valley between earth and sky. It’s difficult to see faces and colours. Someone who is probably Wade snorts at her and turns away. Other shapes linger nearby, ominous, reassuring, hair and studs spiked black against the sunset.

“You should come back with me,” she says suddenly.

Viper smiles like she’s heard that kind of thing before.

 

* * *

 

There’s still a lot for her to learn, but it’s all fairly intuitive or else completely fucking ridiculous, in which case she doesn’t have to worry about it anyway. Viper walks her through the superstitions benignly, offering no real commentary on whether or not she believes what she is saying. At least she’s dressed in a hacked-up battle jacket and leather pants again. Eden probably wouldn’t be able to take a single thing seriously if this had still been coming from the banshee queen of the mountain mists. Scavenge in the city but never sleep there. Eat the dead so they can’t come back and haunt you. Never trust anyone carrying a mace. Don’t get curiosity-killed, though that one’s sort of tricky. Even now, Eden is trying hang on to her questions but there are a few that linger like bruises in the back of her mouth. There are things she seriously fucking wants to know, like:

“Look, where’s your boyfriend? That one guy. Batshit, with the tattoos.”

“Sol,” Viper says, and looks a bit melancholy. Immediately Eden regrets asking her anything about him. “The Wall. The other side, if it’s possible.”

“He’ll get shot to hell,” Eden says, astonished.

Viper scratches lightly at the thin line bisecting her neck. She shrugs. “What does he care now? Some of the people who followed you back here are old friends. They were shot to hell too. Just like you say. Days and days ago.” She gazes around at the little shantytown, all the work and order Eden has been trying to impose on the critters to give them a sense of purpose. It’s hard to tell if she approves or not. “Now look. Very happy. Maybe he can make it. Maybe he can finally see.”

“See,” Eden repeats, lilts the word cynically.

“What his father did,” Viper says flatly. “Kane was always saying things. _If you’ve never been near the Reaper, he won’t know your soul when he sees it._ That man. Hate him. _I have a special plan for this world. I have saved us from the evils of the Outside._ Sol wanted to know what he meant. What evils. What plan.” And Eden is starting to open her mouth but Viper slants her a certain kind of look and says: “Don’t ask so many questions.”

It’s all very intuitive.

Really, to get yourself killed around here, you have to be trying.

 

* * *

 

So the first time Eden gets killed, it’s not her own fault.

They’re heading into the Buzzkill Meat Locker because Viper wants to be shown around, and abruptly Eden supposes she might have made some assumptions about the new crowd who had just followed her in from the flats. She might have assumed that they would have a new respect for the value and beauty of life, that they would preserve it with awe, that they would perhaps not be firing sawed-off shotguns at each other from opposite ends of the bar just as she walked into it; but what is life if not a series of lessons learned, and then a stomach full of shrapnel to make sure you remember them?

Lying on her back on the filthy tiles, she looks extinction in the eye and finds that she isn’t afraid or defiant or any of the things she thought she would be. Not that she ever envisioned a death at the hands of teenagers with mohawks and illegal firearms; but that’s what she finds so funny about it. What’s legality, after all; what’s law? She doesn’t know, though she’d technically been upholding it for a good portion of her life. Humans are animals, same as any other. It’s no unforgiveable descent from the celestial heights if they all die out someday like that last stubborn handful of Sumatran tigers, lovely but lonely. It’s probably better that they should have gone away together.

She folds her hands on the slimy mess of her stomach, smiles up at the beautiful face slipping in and out of focus overhead.

“Hm,” Viper says, and steps over her.

 

* * *

 

She has something like a dream about waking up in Scotland when she should certainly be back in London and climbing out of bed and going downstairs to her mother's room and opening the door. And she expects there to be a horrible, tangled creature or a bloody corpse standing there, but instead there is nothing, an empty room, another disappointment. She whispers to nothing, “Mum, I want to be a victim when I grow up.”

Which is stupid, so she opens her eyes.

 

* * *

 

She wakes with the light coming in at a slightly different angle and Viper’s tongue down her throat. Is a little disappointed to find that the tongue is not forked. Also, that she’ll have to deal with being alive again.

“Don’t eat me,” she says around it. “For fuck’s sake. I’m not dead.”

No pain. It’s unusual. None at all. Just an acute awareness of Viper’s thighs squeezing her hips, of their breasts brushing together, of their mouths sharing breath, and also of Viper’s little sneer gleaming above her like a hook. “I know. And not a monster either; good job. Still going to eat you.”

“So you’re a goddamn necrophiliac,” Eden says, but it comes out wrong, sort of like a coy invitation.

“Not dead,” Viper reminds her.

“Are we still in the doorway?”

“We are.”

“This is definitely not a good place for the kind of, for the _transaction_. That. We.”

From inside, Wade calls: “It’s cool, go ahead.”

Eden sighs. Viper is tracing out the shape of her collarbones with a fingernail, looking keenly down the slope of her tattoos, and Eden finds that it’s just not in her to keep a pretty girl waiting. Biting the lovely swell of her bottom lip makes a lot of sense, and so does snapping open the catches of her kutte to press a palm flat against her chest, because _she_. She is pushing a knee up between Eden’s legs, and sliding a hand down to meet it without even being gentle about the ruined pit of her stomach. In fact, she won’t leave that alone, and she keeps licking the blood off of her fingers and it’s just insane.

“You really are a damn snake,” Eden gasps; “and an exhibitionist. _And_ a cannibal.”

Viper leers. “Watch your wishes. I'll grant them all.”

 

* * *

 

Apparently, this kind of thing happens often enough.

The spectacular public sex, yeah, but also the appearance of Strangers. Eden doesn’t get that this is a problem at first; everyone is acting normal. She heads into the cool humid press of night because that’s what Viper does after Wade comes up and murmurs something to her; she just follows, looks up and down wide alleys stained with the sharp cast of gas lamps and sees a handful of other people doing the same thing. Something’s off about the whole picture, and she suddenly realizes that there is near perfect silence. No music, but that’s normal; maybe twice a month on an overcast night they’ll blast awful songs on ancient vinyl, never more often than that. No voices either, no fighting or tools clashing with materials or motors wasting fuel on some idiot’s idea of a nice burnout. Very quiet. Just wind.

“What the hell,” she says softly, annoyed by her own ignorance. It’s obvious that something is happening; she just has no idea what.

Without even glancing back at her, Viper just says: “Stranger.” And she points down the street.

After squinting a bit, Eden makes it out: a silhouette. A human shape. They all wait while it comes closer. No one goes toward it, or calls out, or makes any kind of a gesture or motion at all, they’re just watching and just watching makes Eden nervous. Once she’s sure that nobody else is going to do anything – like, say, fire a sawed-off shotgun at it – she slips past Viper and moves with purpose. Something she learned from military work. It’s rare, as a soldier, to walk into a situation that’s been completely mapped beforehand. It’s rare that she would _ever_ find herself dumped at a drop point and know exactly what was happening, or where to go, or who needed shooting and who didn’t; but pretending to be the absolute authority was enough to keep a lot of people under control, and what she has on her hands now is a lot of people who need controlling. This is, she thinks, probably just another poor corpse raised by god-knows-what, stumbling around looking for water and food. No need to let the little critters tear its head off.

She get close, and the figure passes under a gas lamp. Female. Small. Hard light presses shadows into the eyesockets like charcoal bricks, and Eden sees a long path of dried blood snaking down from a hole in the throat. It takes her a second, but then she recognizes Corporal Read all at once and she also starts to hear the gurgle of her breathing and the strange, endless growl pouring out of those pretty lips like black ichor. There’s something wrong with her. She stumbles and Eden means to go forward and catch her, but there are critters holding her back now, surrounding her.

“That’s Read,” Eden snaps. “I know her, she drove me in here. Let me go, I have to talk to her!”

A girl with blue hair and about a dozen ear bolts jams her shoulder into Eden’s ribcage, shakes her head against her stomach. Others are shouting something she doesn’t understand at all, but she does hear _kill it_ and _eat it_ and throws them off, goes to Read with her hands out.

And Read lunges at her with a bloody smear of a mouth and bites at her. She _actually_ tries to bite her, and swings her fists out like a maniac when she misses, clips Eden across the cheek. She’s a hell of a lot stronger than she looks. Eden is amazed, and entirely pissed off.

“What’s wrong with you?” she snaps.

Gas cans are coming out of the shacks. The critters are splashing gas on Read, kind of playing around, making a game out of it, and Eden considers telling them off until Read takes another swipe at her. That’s enough to grate away what’s left of her nerves. Whether she’s delirious or not, the girl is being a crazy bitch. Eden backs off, lets everybody hoot and do their thing. Finally someone tosses a burning rag at her and she lights up but doesn’t scream. She tries to ram a few things, but a couple kids are carrying big sheet metal shields and they batter her around until she drops like a shooting star, burns vividly in the lacework flames sputtering in the dirt for a while and is snuffed out at last with shovels and plastic garbage bags.

 

* * *

 

“I told you,” Viper says. “We eat them so they don’t haunt us.”

“Uh,” Eden replies.

“Not human anymore. You saw. Monstrous.” She pauses, but Eden doesn’t say anything at all to that. “Fine. Don’t eat. You’ll be hungry later. No bitching about it, not to me.”

The whole scene is surreal. Eden has been to office party potlucks that were less civilized than the way food is being handed out around her. Taking a seat on an overturned oil drum, she watches them uncertainly, catches Wade’s arm as he wanders by.

“Don’t you usually do the party thing,” she demands, kind of put out that she’s not going to see the show this time either, “or were we just lucky before?”

Wade shrugs. “Well, you came in and blew things up. We got excited. _I_ got excited.” He shoves her over with his ass, sits down beside her. “I also got shot.”

“Your face is healing up okay,” she offers.

“Thanks.”

They sit for a while in silence. Wade chews on something that Eden is determined to ignore.

“So I’ve been meaning to ask someone about this,” she begins at length. “And it’s not really important. I’m just kind of curious. Do you know if Doctor Kane, well, do you know if Kane did something with the virus, or had something to do with the virus that he wouldn’t,” and she struggles for a moment, moving her hands to reach for words, “Jesus, I don’t know. Did he do anything he wouldn’t want to admit to later?”

“I don’t know anything about Marcus,” Wade says quickly. “He used to have the lab. He used to inject people with things, first to try to save them from the Reaper, then to ...  work with it, I think he said. I don’t remember, I was a kid. Doesn’t matter. Sol chased him off.” He rips off a mouthful, chews noisily. On purpose, Eden is sure. “That’s about it.”

“Huh,” Eden says. She’s watching Viper, who is handing out pieces of meat on pieces of metal to people who look like they should have a government to hate. She’s thinking about Read, who was nice enough, but who wouldn’t have had any contact with the Reaper virus in her life. Nothing to _work with_, if that’s really something Kane said. And there it is again, that aggressive stirring in the back of her mind, the doubt and horrified anger. She’s fucking sick of that. “I am kind of hungry.”

“Here.” A makeshift plate is set on her leg. “Unidentified meat. Enjoy.”

If she looks at it, she won’t stop looking at it; so she just picks it up and bites off a bit and starts chewing.

“Ha,” Wade says. “I got you, that was a piece of her tit.”

“You’re a cunt,” Eden informs him, but doesn’t spit it out.

Viper turns and scans the assembled hairdos and kutten. She catches Eden eye. Smiles.

 

* * *

 

A few autoturrets are programmed to face the other side of the Wall when the whole system is active. They’re firing on something. On a lot of somethings. All night, and then all day, dry pops echoing irregular but steady in the air, and the air hangs a bit awkwardly on the frame of the world. Even animals know better than to wander near the Wall on either side; and seeing a dozen or more things explode would probably get the message across even to the dumbest of them.

Five shots a minute now. At least.

“Always wanting back into the garden,” Viper breathes, and then licks the words back out of Eden’s ear. “How sad that they locked themselves out for good.”

“It’s not funny,” Eden says. “Don’t laugh.”

She drapes herself on the curve of Eden's back. She tugs on Eden's drab, dark hair thoughtfully. She replies: “I’m not laughing.”

For the first time in ages, Eden does.


End file.
